Footnote is brainy filmmaking of the highest level — a motion picture that is as difficult
to pigeonhole as it is easy to enjoy.

The fourth work by Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar,
Footnote took the screenplay award at Cannes, won nine Israeli Oscars (including picture,
script and direction for Cedar, plus a pair of acting awards) and was one of five nominees for the
foreign-language film Oscar. All despite subject matter that couldn’t sound more unlikely and even
obscure.

Set in the spirited precincts of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University,
Footnote deals with the implacable rivalry between two scholars of the Talmud, the complex
and sacred key text of the Jewish religious tradition. These competitive scholars, the misanthropic
Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba) and the gregarious Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), happen to be father and
son.

It is Cedar’s particular gift to have found a way to make the infighting and the rivalries of
wide interest in and of themselves, and also capable of speaking easily to larger issues.

The inventive, playfully cinematic ways that Cedar presents the drama — such as using unspooling
microfilm as a recurring visual theme — are essential in keeping the audience involved.

After the words “The most difficult day in the life of Professor Shkolnik” appear on the screen,
we immediately see an older academic-looking man, presumably the individual in question, and a
voice-over listing extensive and impressive professorial credits: international recognition, nine
books written, dozens of papers, the respect of his peers, etc.

Only gradually does it fully register that, though it is father Eliezer Shkolnik we are looking
at, the voice is extolling the virtues of his son Uriel, and it is the father’s difficult day
because seeing Uriel being inducted into the Israeli National Academy of Science — an honor he
himself hasn’t received — is eating him up. It’s simply the first of many of delicious
reverses.

Eliezer is a philologist, a close textual researcher into language, who spent more than 30 years
painstakingly analyzing versions of the Jerusalem Talmud only to have rival scholar Yehuda Grossman
(Micah Lewesohn) beat him to publication because of a random act of fate.

The pride of Eliezer’s life is a footnote dedicated to him in a monumental analysis of the
Talmud by the legendary P. Feinstein, making him the only living person mentioned by name among
thousands of notes.

If Eliezer is a fussy minimalist, son Uriel very much sees the big picture. Beautifully played
by Israeli star Ashkenazi, Uriel is a born schmoozer who writes expansively and conceptually on
what the Talmud might mean without worrying overly much about the specific words, an approach that
is anathema to his father.

Uriel is a difficult man in his own way but, in conversations with both his wife, Dikla (Alma
Zak), and his long-suffering mother, Yehudit (Alisa Rosen), it is clear that he cares more about
the father-son relationship than the older man does.

Though both actors won Israeli Academy Awards for their work,
Footnote is impossible to imagine without Bar Aba’s fearless performance as the
cantankerous Eliezer. He is marvelous as a man who holds it all inside, conveying considerable
subtleties of emotion through an expression that on the surface never seems to change.

Footnote kicks into gear when it is shockingly announced that the unsmiling Eliezer, of
all people, has won the Israel Prize, the country’s top academic honor.

Uriel is just beginning to get used to what that means when, in a brilliant scene that initially
echoes the claustrophobic humor of the Marx Brothers in
A Night at the Opera, comedy and tragedy fatally intertwine in a way that seems new.
Amusing and disturbing in equal measure,
Footnote does more than ask the provocative question “What is more important than truth?”;
it tries to answer it as well.